Peasant Petitions

Social Relations and Economic Life on Landed Estates, 1600-1850

R. Houston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137394095
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book examines the structures and texture of rural social relationships, using one type of document found in abundance over all the four component parts of Britain and Ireland: petitions from tenants to their landlords. The book offers unexpected angles on many aspects of society and economy on estates in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Part I
Introduction: Understanding the Rural Societies of the British Isles

1

‘Unimportant minorities’: the landholding peasantry of Britain and Ireland, c. 1600–1850

The fundamental structure of landownership and farming was already established by the mid-eighteenth century, and certainly by the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. England was a country of mainly large landlords, cultivated by tenant farmers working the land with hired labourers. This structure was still partly hidden by an undergrowth of economically marginal cottager-labourers, or other small independents and semi-independents, but this should not obscure the fundamental transformation which had already taken place. By 1790 … a ‘peasantry’ in the usual sense of the word no longer existed.¹

The conventional image of British rural society created by capitalist agriculture during the eighteenth century is summed up in Eric Hobsbawm’s words. Small farmers, we read, survived only in ‘thinly populated’ parts of Wales and Scotland, and ‘perhaps in parts of Northern England’ – and of course in Ireland, where J.E. Pomfret thought it pointless to distinguish between ‘farmer’ or tenant and ‘cottier’, as most landholders were miserably poor peasants.² As a result historians often ignore what Hobsbawm and George Rudé called ‘unimportant minorities’: the landholding peasantry of late-seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early-nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland.³ This diverse group usually rented small plots of land from well-off private owners, or they held by some form of base tenure like copyhold. Their relations with the owners of the land they worked and with fellow members of farming and small-town communities are the subject of this book.

One image of farmers focuses on the yeoman freeholder, master of his own fate and often that of his fellows, by being enfranchised in parliamentary elections. Yet only a fifth of all landholders in Tudor England were freeholders, two-thirds were copyholders, and the rest leaseholders or tenants at will.⁴ Great estates dominated landholding and the trend was towards yet more concentration thanks to the dissolution of the monasteries, late-Tudor inflation, and the ‘decline of the English yeoman’ between c.1650 and c.1750.⁵ Copyholders, between freeholders and leaseholders, had often enjoyed considerable security of tenure and a moderate level of surplus extraction, but the pressures on landlords in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw them mount sometimes vigorous campaigns to weaken tenure and raise rents and/or entry fines. As a result leasehold came to dominate landholding during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time lease terms reduced from one or more lives to 21 years or less; the same trend is evident in Wales from the late seventeenth century.⁶

Holding size remained modest across much of Britain: in the 1880s only 18 per cent of English farms were over 100 acres in size.⁷ In the four northern counties of England the trend towards leasehold was attenuated and copyholders were often successful in resisting landlord efforts to change their tenures, especially in the later sixteenth century. At certain times Chancery protected them, at others the crown itself because of the needs of Border service; uniquely, Cumberland was divided into five wards or guards because of the need regularly to defend it against the Scots.⁸ The result, according to the county surveyors for the Board of Agriculture John Bailey and George Culley, was a distinctive social structure. ‘There are probably few counties, where property in land is divided into such small parcels as in Cumberland, and those small properties so universally occupied by the owners.’⁹ First published in 1794, Bailey and Culley’s opinion was paraphrased by Lord Lowther in a letter of 1805, claiming that ‘property in the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland is very much divided, perhaps more so than any other county in England’.¹⁰ These were mostly customary tenants from the early seventeenth century onwards, whose holdings comprised roughly two-thirds of the land in the county during the eighteenth century.¹¹ Under a ‘species of vassalage’ according to Bailey and Culley, they were ‘subject to the payment of fines and heriots, on alienation, death of the lord, or death of tenant, and the payment of certain annual rents, and performance of various services, called boon-days; such as getting and leading the lord’s peats, ploughing and harrowing his land, reaping his corn, hay-making, carrying letters, &c. &c. whenever summoned by the lord’.¹²

For all these feudal trappings, customary tenures in Cumbria were close to conferring the rights of freehold, this alongside rents which had mostly lagged inflation. Even in the eighteenth century, customary tenants were so numerous (perhaps 10,000 at the time Bailey and Culley wrote of a county only half-enclosed) that they were able to club together to mount robust defences against landlords, who tried to raise entry fines or restrict access to timber: they had the money too, for their annual or ‘ancient’ rents had not kept up with inflation.¹³ Their farms were small: as late as the 1820s, for example, more than half the customary holdings on the barony of Gilsland were 5–40 acres.¹⁴ These people are one of the interests of this book. It considers estates in the north-west of England (Cumberland; the Leconfield papers), the southern or central Highlands of Scotland (Perthshire and Argyllshire; the Breadalbane papers), the north of Ireland (various series), and Wales (ditto).

The royal surveyors of the Percy lands after the northern rising of 1569 stated that all his customary tenants held copyholds of inheritance.¹⁵ Elsewhere on the Percy lands, in Northumberland, tenants sometimes held by ‘the custom of Cockermouth’, but this was successfully challenged in a Chancery case of 1609 and one held before assizes in 1613. Adjudications confirmed that, in the areas affected, tenants did not hold customary estates of inheritance and this heralded the demise of ‘the custom of Cockermouth’ outside Cumberland and its replacement by leasehold.¹⁶ In contrast, leasehold remained rare in Cumberland, and the remainder of the county was freehold, the latter tenure growing in importance with enfranchisement of customary or ‘archaic’ tenures from the sixteenth century onwards.¹⁷ Small owner-occupiers, most worth between £15 and £30 a year, survived there and in Westmorland, Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Wales throughout the eighteenth century. Only in the nineteenth century did they start to decline in numbers as small farmers began to find their holdings chronically uneconomic, though this type of smallholding co-existed alongside large farms in Cumberland into the twentieth century.¹⁸ The county comprised 970,000 acres, of which 342,000 were hill pasture.¹⁹ Even in the 1790s day labourers still got part of their payment in kind.²⁰ In 1851 60 per cent of Cumberland farms were less than 100 acres (compared with a national average of 22 per cent) and less than 7 per cent over 300 acres (33 per cent).²¹ Farms were small in the north-west, and the dividing line between farmers and the few labourers was unclear, leading historian Keith Snell to warn that ‘an entirely wage-dependent, socially isolated rural proletariat was regionally rare’.²²

In Scotland, land ownership was highly polarised, making the terms ‘farmer’ and ‘tenant’ almost interchangeable; until the eighteenth century occupational or status designations were seldom used for people whose main work was in agriculture. ‘Feuing’, notably of church land before and after the Reformation, helped create a class of lesser owner-occupiers or ‘lairds’ (lords) who were close economically to English yeomen freeholders (though far less numerous) and socially to the gentry. A feu was a perpetual lease, or, technically, a ‘feudal’ grant, made in return for a substantial cash sum and smaller subsequent annual payments, rather than for service. There were other ways of holding land, such as security for a mortgage (‘wadsetting’), but the relative absence of a market for small plots of land after the sixteenth century meant that the chances of becoming an owner-occupier were more limited in Scotland than England, and there were just 7,500 landowners in Scotland c.1830, among a population of 2.3 million; in the 1870s 1,500 of them owned 90 per cent of the land and the largest 25 landlords held a third of Scotland. In 1873 owners with more than 20,000 acres each held 7 per cent of England; in Scotland the figure was 58 per cent, with more than three-quarters of the land owned by 580 people.²³ Leaseholders or tenants at will occupied almost all the land in Scotland. Other than a small number of so-called ‘kindly tenants’, there was no equivalent of English copyhold, and true freehold was a pure form of feudal tenure enjoyed by the few. In 1887 less than 10 per cent of parishes in north-east Scotland had more than 15 per cent of arable land in owner occupation and no parish had more than a third of tilled acreage held thus.²⁴ More, the farms were usually small. In Perthshire and the north-east at the end of the nineteenth century the average size was about 50 acres and only in the most agriculturally advanced counties of East Lothian and Berwickshire did aver...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I Introduction: Understanding the Rural Societies of the British Isles
• Part II Landed Estates: Personnel, Organisation, Documentation, and Elements of Variance
• Part III Authorship, Physical form, and Written Style of Petitions
• Part IV The Content of Petitions
• Part V Land, Psychology, and the ‘Hard Surfaces of Life’: Asking for Poor Relief on Landed Estates
• Select bibliography of secondary literature published since 1960
• Index